‘Lame Duck’ Tenure to End Aug. 15 : Postal Chief Would Drop 2-Day, Monday Deliveries

Departing Postmaster General Albert V. Casey said Wednesday that he will recommend to his successor that post offices stop promising two-day delivery on huge quantities of mail because the service is not reliable.

Casey said also that he would like to end Monday delivery of residential mail but will not recommend that because “there’d be a howl” of protest.

Thus, Casey said during a breakfast session with The Times’ Washington bureau, he is sticking with what he believes are attainable goals, including a controversial restructuring of management.

The postmaster general said that he has been forbidden to talk about details of a case in which a senior postal official pleaded guilty to participation in a scheme to steer a contract involving $250-million worth of computerized mail-sorting equipment to one of the bidders. The contract is still pending and an internal investigation is under way.

The inquiry will also examine the circumstances of Casey’s appointment. Concerns have been raised in Congress that Casey’s hiring may have been linked to the contracts, although he has denied any involvement in the case.

Three Delivery Schedules

From any given city, the Postal Service is supposed to deliver first-class mail as far as 60 miles in one day. Delivery over a distance of between 60 and 600 miles takes two days, and delivery to a farther point takes three days.

Casey said that the one-day and three-day deliveries work fine but that there is a “lack of predictability” on two-day service. Only 87% of metered mail in the two-day category is being delivered on time, compared with 92% in the one-day category and 91% in the three-day category.

Casey said: “I say don’t raise the bridge, lower the river. Get rid of the two-day delivery and have one-day and three-day delivery. Then, people can count on it.”

About 48.5 million pieces of first-class mail fall into the two-day category daily.

Monday deliveries should be eliminated and mail sorting should be cut back on weekends because volume is low on those days, Casey said. “I could do it,” he said of such changes, “but I’m sure there’d be a court order and a law passed and everything else” in opposition.

Therefore, Casey said, he is focusing on upgrading areas such as transportation, marketing and technology.

Cites Streamlining Effect

Casey said he already has eliminated a great deal of bureaucracy by getting rid of some divisions within the postal service and redesignating local postmasters “general managers/postmasters.”

Although “all hell broke loose” when he started making the changes, Casey said, it allowed him to “write the job description and make them serve at my pleasure. I can can them, I can give them incentive pay. I can do everything.”

Casey, who will leave his post on Aug. 15 after seven months on the job to assume a teaching position at Southern Methodist University, said that his “lame-duck” status has helped him bring about many changes because his stated intention to leave soon insulated him from criticism.

“The smartest thing I really did--I did it by accident, but it turned out to be brilliant--was to announce my resignation before I announced my acceptance of the job,” he said. “Immediately, everybody said, ‘Hell, you’re nothing but a lame duck, you won’t be able to do anything in Washington.’

“Well . . . everybody in Washington is a lame duck.”